In Defense of Liz Lemon

Judging from my Twitter feed, there’s been a backlash to “30 Rock” this season, particularly the character of Liz Lemon, played by Tina Fey. Here’s oneexample of these anti-Lemon blog posts. Here’s another. Here’s another. The argument in all these pieces (many by writers I respect) is pretty much the same: “30 Rock” used to be funny, but now it’s sour and negative. Liz Lemon was once our heroine—a sassy, confident, if somewhat neurotic single career lady. Now she’s become infantilized and dumb. She behaves as if Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) is her daddy. She doesn’t trust her own judgment, she’s bad at her job, and there’s something awfully misogynist about all this! Liz Lemon is pathetic.

Well, I can’t get on board the hate train, especially after last week’s tour-de-force episode, in which Liz morphed from a crazy old subway lady (every New Yorker’s dream: she gets her way at every turn) into Heath Ledger’s Joker. Someone needs to speak up for the Lemon, and for the Fey. Because from the beginning Liz Lemon was pathetic. That was what was enthralling, and even revolutionary, about the character. Unlike some other adorkable or slutty-fabulous characters I could name, Liz only superficially resembled the protagonist of a romantic comedy, ready to remove her glasses and be loved. Beneath that, she was something way more interesting: a strange, specific, workaholic, NPR-worshipping, white-guilt-infected, sardonic, curmudgeonly, hyper-nerdy New Yorker. In the first episode, Jack nails her on sight as “a New York third-wave feminist, college-educated, single-and-pretending-to-be-happy-about-it, over-scheduled, undersexed, you buy any magazine that says ‘healthy body image’ on the cover and every two years you take up knitting for … a week.” Even Liz had to admit he scored a point.

That was why the show worked: it rarely made Liz an empowering role model, although many women certainly identified with her. The show let her be the George Costanza, not the Mary Richards. And, refreshingly, this appeal had little to do with sex or relationships: a lot of it was about her job. Liz was professionally successful, but she was a sellout. The lady-centric pitch for her show—it was supposed to be “The Girlie Show,” a showcase for her best friend, Jenna—had been commercialized into TGS, a mediocre SNL ripoff, with low ratings and fart gags. Liz needed Jack because her life was a mess, but their rapport wasn’t primarily based around gender: it was about the cocky powerful suits versus the smug weakling creatives, although this satire was done (for once) with a woman at the center. In its apocalyptic view of the TV industry, “30 Rock” famously faced off against another show that premiered in the fall of 2006, Aaron Sorkin’s accidentally hilarious “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.” Sorkin’s show was a drama (or really, a temper tantrum) about two male comedy writers portrayed as heroic geniuses. In contrast, “30 Rock” was a brilliant comedy about a stupid comedy, a feminist sitcom about a woman whose feminism was endlessly lampooned.

Sure, Liz had tiny moments of triumph—as when she showed Jack how hard it was to be an actor—but she lost most battles from the start, because that’s the nature of network TV: compromise, compromise, compromise. (She didn’t win that “Followship” award for nothing.) Also, Liz’s nerdliness was not cute, and, over time, it was often quite disgusting: she wore Duane Reade bags for underwear, she binged on cheese, she was pathologically prudish. In the first season, she lived with a beeper salesman, Dennis, whose nickname for her was “Dummy.” After finally getting the guts to end it with Dennis, Liz had several promising relationships, including one great one, when she dated an ex-alcoholic named Floyd. But he moved away to Cleveland and got engaged to someone else, which I thought was fantastic: sometimes, that’s what happens. In her late thirties, Liz dated a white British guy named Wesley Snipes, who was endlessly thrown at her in classic rom-com soulmate style. She refused to settle. And she got her dream: airline pilot Carol Burnett, who was too similar to Liz in the end, since he shared her cranky, unforgiving bent. The relationship climaxed with one of the best scenes on the show, a crazy screaming match down the aisle of Carol’s airplane in which Liz nearly killed an elderly hostage in order to win an argument.

That has always been one of the most radical things about “30 Rock,” the way it has continually punctured Liz’s image of herself as a spunky brunette underdog. Early on, she went to her high-school reunion and discovered that she had not in fact been the overlooked nerd—she had been the sarcastic bully, throwing zingers at women she envied (an insight Tina Fey has regularly expressed about herself). When her old boyfriend Floyd came back to town, he got drunk and blurted out the truth about why he prefers his young aerobics-instructor fiancée: “She’s alive! Like a deer who runs and sniffs and jumps and stares. Not like the badger, with her glasses and her rules about weekday sex.”

All that stuff was true about Liz, and I thought it was great when, last season, in the “Reaganing” episode, Liz finally confronted her own anxieties about sex, a hallmark of the character from the beginning. (The episode featured a montage of every prudish remark Liz has made.) In the midst of a massive run in which he fixes the problems of everyone around him, Jack helps Liz flash back to a childhood masturbation trauma, which, with typical wackiness, involved roller skates and posters of Grizzly Adams and Tug McGraw. The anti-Lemon squad might not like that Jack was the one who guided Liz to that insight, but after all, his life has changed too: yes, he’s married and a father, but from the perspective of Jack’s future self, he’s a pathetic failure, currently running a worthless network bought by the lame Philadelphia conglomerate Kabletown.

And the thing is, Liz’s confrontations with her worst qualities have actually strengthened her. That’s what so odd about the backlash. This season, Liz is happier than ever—and for once, she’s rejecting Jack’s influence, finding her own bliss, embracing her oddball nature, going on the Oprah-style vacations she feels like taking. Unbeknownst to Jack, she began dating a cute younger guy who made no money, had a stupid career path, but treated her well. Of course, when Jack found out, he judged her for this, got inside her head, and made fun of her boyfriend’s name (which is, to be fair, Criss Chros). But then Liz realized that she actually likes Criss and was an idiot to dump him for shallow reasons; i.e., Jack’s reasons. She goes back to him, against Jack’s advice.

On Valentine’s Day, she and Criss have a fight at IKEA and she assumes they’ve broken up. Instead, when she goes home, he’s made dinner. “You wanted a table, I wasn’t super-helpful, who cares?” he says. “I tend to care,” she admits. “I let little things ruin stuff. I stopped shopping at Kmart because I found out Kathy Ireland didn’t design any of her signature socks.” Liz tells him that, at forty-one, she can finally change, but Criss thinks that’s ridiculous. “Eh, why bother. You can get mad at dumb stuff, that’s your thing. I’ll get over it, that’s my thing. It’s kind of perfect.” And he gives her a table he made from a Herman Cain poster and fallen branches from Riverside Park.

As for her career, while Liz was once a people-pleasing, prickly, masochistic workaholic, she’s gotten awfully laissez-faire. This is not a bad thing. She’s in her forties now and she’s stopped obsessing about whether she’ll have a baby or whether her job is ideal. She took a fun hobby that Jack would never approve of, shaking her butt as a middle-aged cheerleader for the Liberty. She used Jack’s negotiating tricks against him, getting him so exasperated that he negotiated against himself on her behalf. She’s now paid well (while Liz used to be bad with money, she’s now outright rich) and she’s more chill and she’s getting laid with a handsome, nice guy. I’m not seeing what’s so pathetic. In fact, the show seems to recognize how good her life has become, because they brought in the excellent Kristen Schaal as a female intern who is so impressed by Liz she wishes she could wear her lips as a mask. In “30 Rock” terms, that’s a huge compliment.

Still, maybe the best thing about Liz Lemon is that all her idiosyncrasies—her sourness, her prudishness, her love of “The Real Housewives”—don’t have to mean as much, anyway. When the show started, every bespectacled, slovenly, overworked media chick was delighted to finally have a character who reflected her. (I should know.) But we’re living in a golden age for female comedy, post-“Bridesmaids” and post-“Young Adult” (a movie I loved, but we can argue about that later). On TV in particular, this season has been a fat sweep of sitcoms starring or made by women, some of which I deeply enjoy, some of which I hate: “New Girl,” “Suburgatory,” “Whitney,” “Up All Night,” “Two Broke Girls,” that Chelsea Handler disaster, and the upcoming “Don’t Trust the B---- in Apt 23”. There are amazing female characters on “Raising Hope,” “Cougar Town,” “Community,” “Happy Endings,” “The Middle,” “The Office,” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” Actually, Jenna Maroney of “30 Rock” has also had a solid recent plot arc, one of the kinkiest and most sex-positive I’ve ever seen on TV. Plus, Lena Dunham’s terrific new series “Girls” launches on HBO in April.

And then there is Leslie Knope, of “Parks and Recreation,” a very different character from Liz Lemon—sunny and positive and eyes-on-the-prize and currently juggling more than one man. I love them both. We all know this has always been the goal: enough female funny out there that each one doesn’t have to hold the banner quite so high. As for me, I’m still on Team Lemon. Or, to quote the woman herself, “Man, do my feet hurt in heels sometimes … and other things women talk about.”